Bitcoin’s Christmas All-Time High, 1inch Token, Livecoin Hack + More News

Get your daily, bite-sized digest of cryptoasset and blockchain-related news – investigating the stories flying under the radar of today’s crypto news.

Bitcoin news

• Number one cryptocurrency by market capitalization, bitcoin (BTC), has reached USD 24,603 today, setting a new all-time-high, according to Coinpaprika.com. It pulled back somewhat since, standing at USD 24,148 at the time of writing (15:20 UTC).
• Grayscale Investment Holdings currently holds USD 16.33bn worth of assets under management, with USD 14.25bn in bitcoin. according to bybt.com, a website that tracks Grayscale holdings. Meanwhile, digital assets company BitGo recently announced that it too holds USD 16bn in digital assets under custody.

DeFi news

• Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform 1inch has launched a governance and utility token – the 1INCH token, used for both the platform’s automated market maker protocol and its decentralized exchange aggregator service. Per the announcement, 1inch Network will now be governed by a DAO, and with it, the 1inch Foundation introduced their Aggregation Governance module, a Liquidity Protocol Governance module, and the 1INCH TOKEN Liquidity Mining Program. Furthermore, all wallets registered before December 24 will receive 1INCH tokens as long as they meet one of the stated conditions.

Exchanges news

• Russian cryptocurrency exchange Livecoin has been hacked. It said it lost control of all their servers and nodes, stating that they are “not able to stop our service in time.” Therefore, they asked their clients to stop making deposits, and to halt all trading and interaction with the exchange. “We are under a carefully planned attack, which has been prepared, as we assume, over the last few months,” the website currently says. Hackers gained access to the Livecoin portal and modified exchange rates to 10-15 times their normal values, ZDNet reported. Some Reddit users suggested this could be an exit scam.
• Following the December 21 attack, which forced crypto exchange Exmo to suspend all withdrawals, they announced that enabling of deposits and withdrawals for main cryptocurrencies is tentatively scheduled for December 25-26, when users will have to generate a new wallet address. Meanwhile, the exchange claimed that about USD 4m of crypto stolen in the hack that cost it c. 5% of its total assets was allegedly withdrawn through Poloniex, which Poloniex denied to Cointelegraph.

Regulation news

• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered data verification startup Tierion to pay back investors in its TNT tokens after finding that its USD 25m initial coin offering (ICO) violated securities laws. Per the announcement, Tierion must disable trading of TNT, and it must pay the SEC USD 250,000 in penalties.
• Crypto-sceptic Nouriel Roubini called Jake Chervinsky, General Counsel at Compound Finance, “delusional” following the latter’s tweet in which he argued that there’s “exactly zero chance” that idea of stablecoin payments implementing on-chain Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know-Your-Customer (KYC) identification processes will become an enforceable law any time soon. Roubini said that incoming U.S. president Joe Biden and his team will actually be much tougher than Donald Trump in controlling cryptocurrency and “will crack down on this criminal tax evading & AML-KYC-TFC-evading crypto/shitcoins cesspool much more than [Steven] Mnuchin.”

Legal news

• Ethereum (ETH) developer Virgil Griffith, who was arrested in November 2019 on charges of conspiracy to aid North Korea in utilizing cryptocurrency, may not have technically violated the law regardless of his intentions at the time, said a Manhattan federal judge, as reported by Law360. A trial has been tentatively scheduled for September 2021.